The Folded World

by Amity Gaige

  “Listen,” Bruce said to Charlie. “You look tired. Take tomorrow off. It’s Friday. Have yourself a nice long weekend. I will personally check in with your clients.”

  The big man stood. Charlie remained sitting, staring at the table.

  “I don’t need to take tomorrow off,” Charlie said. “Seems like I should be working more, not less.”

  “We don’t blame you,” Bruce said. “OK? I understand the situation to my satisfaction. I’m not sanctioning you.”

  With that, Harriet looked up at Bruce. Her face betrayed surprise, as if the plan had been changed mid-course. As Bruce slapped Charlie on the back, Harriet bent forward to fetch her purse from the floor. When she looked up, Charlie saw for the first time, her mask of niceness. Her eyes met his briefly, then she smiled with a tight, boardroom smile. She did not like him anymore. She did not trust him. If she trusted him, she would have yelled. If she had thought he was worth it. She did not call him Chief. He was on the other side of something now and he knew it. He would have to prove himself somehow. It was his reputation that was being sanctioned. Whether or not Bruce said so.

  Yet here he was, on a Friday morning, taking the day off, dragging his mother-in-law’s gargantuan suitcase up two flights of stairs. Just to think of it all together gave him a stomachache. He felt that someone might have forewarned him as a child that one day relief and trouble and love and loathing would huddle together on the same inch of territory. In the stairwell, on this dark morning, it was guilt, too—guilt for the fact that it might be possible to extract forgiveness unjustly, which cheapened everything, the music of Alice’s laughter, love, love, fatty fistfuls of it, late-night sex, intimacy so convincing it was as if they had never left off and he had never come home late once, and she was childless and ticklish and untold.

  “It’s too big,” Marlene said. “The suitcase.”

  Below him on the stairs, his mother-in-law looked up at him, tapping her lips.

  “I can handle it,” Charlie said.

  “It’s too heavy. You’re going to strain your back. Put it down.”

  “Can’t put it down now,” said Charlie, grunting up the second set of stairs.

  “Use your legs,” she crawed from below. “Use your abdominals.”

  Then, for a moment, Charlie imagined letting go. Just, letting go. The black suitcase, barreling down the stairs. Seems like we could have headed this off somehow.

  Not until they all crowded around the little wooden table for dinner did they realize how tiny the apartment really was, with its tiny lamps throwing tiny light. They loomed over the table. How large they felt, each one, how large especially the things they were not saying, for Alice did not really believe that Charlie had taken the day off just to fetch his mother-in-law from the bus station, and Charlie knew she did not believe it, yet there it was, affected quite nicely, and wasn’t the chicken delicious? He reached over to her. She leaned toward him, her eyes shiny with some sort of emotion. What? He whispered silently. What is it?

  “Cinnamon,” said Marlene, wagging her fork. “That’s the secret ingredient.”

  Charlie turned away from Alice. “Well, it’s delicious,” he said.

  Alice yawned. “God, I’m tired.”

  “Of course you are, Alice darling,” said Marlene, pushing more chicken on to her daughter’s plate. “I was wiped out with just one baby.”

  “You had to do it alone.”

  Marlene paused, her fingers greasy. “Sure, but with Charlie away during the day—” she nodded respectfully in his direction.

  “True,” Charlie nodded. “Alice takes care of them on her own all week.” He smiled. “That’s why you’re here.”

  Marlene’s emptied suitcase sat in the corner of the living room. It was too huge to fit in her corner of the nursery, next to the twin bed they’d set up there for her. Marlene kept stealing glances at the suitcase. Abruptly, she stood and covered it with a blanket, then sat down with satisfaction.

  “Goddamned monstrosity,” she muttered.

  It was all going very well, Marlene thought. Very well by her count. But what sort of count was her count, the mathematics of a lonely woman? Gradually, sawing at her chicken, she worried that she might have been overconfident about her performance as a grandmother. She was worried that she wasn’t qualified to care for a baby after all these years. In Charlie and Alice’s brief visits to Gloucester, she had only hours to dandle her granddaughters, not enough time to do any harm. Perhaps now she would err in some terrible way and Alice would never forgive her. She would make them sick. She would all smother them, living in the same small room. She would take their oxygen.

  “So who’s taking care of Wednesday?”

  Marlene looked up. “Denise, the archivist.”

  “The archivist?” said Charlie, vaguely amused.

  “From the library,” said Marlene, raising her eyebrows a touch, annoyed that she should have to remind him where she worked.

  “That’s nice of her,” said Alice.

  “Well, she’s an archivist. She’s good at taking care of old things,” said Marlene.

  They all chewed in silence. A cry pealed out from the nursery. All three of them stood at once.

  They laughed. It was a relief. The baby crying. The three of them standing.

  “Eat, both of you.” Marlene moved toward the kitchen. “Allow me. That’s what I’m here for.”

  They could hear her opening the cabinets and mixing bottles of formula, just as she had been instructed only hours before.

  “To me, it’s exotic,” Marlene called from the kitchen. “Wipes and nipples and boppies. Binkies.” Then she sang a few bars of “My Favorite Things,” substituting these words, and Charlie and Alice looked at each other and laughed with weariness, and held hands across the table.

  They spent that weekend shopping and walking through parks, and sitting together—the five of them—in an outdoor café, warmed by the tea-weak sun, growing more comfortable with the arrangement. Sunday was unseasonably warm, smelling of the green, living smell of deep thaw. The tops of the trees were dusted red. It was February. Their shadows grew long by four o’clock.

  Walking home under pink shadows of dusk, Marlene guarding her turn at the stroller, Charlie chased Alice down the sidewalk doing his impression of the elephant man, back humped, one leg dragging behind. She ran away screaming, her hair beating on the back of her coat. He chased her into the street.

  “Watch out for cars!” called Marlene.

  He tackled Alice as soon as they were within reach of grass. He bit her earlobe with his teeth, making ghoulish noises. Tangled in the hard dry grass, she struggled and screamed, and tried to roll away. He leapt after her, seizing her by the ankle, and dragged her back to him.

  “You guys!” said Marlene, “That’s someone’s private property.”

  He had her pinned now by the wrists, chips of leaves in her hair. Her small eyes disappeared in laughter. The air felt cold and fresh in his lungs, and god how he wanted to run just then, run with her in a fireman’s carry, all the way down time and back around to the beginning, when he first pushed open the pub door and stepped out coatless into the blue winter to chase her. If he could just have one moment back, then the whole rest of his personal history would come floating down behind it. He would be Charlie Shade from Mattoon again, class president again, cross country co-captain again, someone who always pretty much knew what he was doing again, someone with a certain private honorability. He lay down beside her, panting.

  “Do you remember—” he said. “That old bar inside the VFW where I—once took you dancing? You wore a dress—very low-cut. Those guys. You gave them all—strokes.”

  “Everything—was borrowed then. Or stolen—”

  “Stolen?”

  “You stole—” said Alice, “my landlady’s—newspaper. Every Sunday.”

  “You knew about that?”

  “We were poorer even than now—”

  “We swore we’d n
ever be rich. Remember?”

  “Stupid kids!”

  They laughed. Then Charlie’s face grew serious, and he pressed one hand firmly against her temple.

  “So,” he said. “Do you still believe in me?”

  She raised her head to look at him, then set it back down on the grass.

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He lowered his face to the stiff, vaguely sweet surface. “Because I need you to. I really need you to.”

  On the other side of the street, Marlene passed by, pushing the stroller. The twins were asleep. The street was thick with dusk. Marlene smiled. She watched the figures on the grass. She was embarrassed and yet touched to see them sprawled on the grass, embracing and whispering. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought they were just two kids, young lovers, just starting out. But then again, she thought, wasn’t that what they were? She called over her shoulder, waving them on.

  “Remember to check yourselves for ticks!” she cried.

  People passing by the campus often mistook it for a prep school, expecting to see boys jogging out across the fields, carrying lacrosse sticks. But the only figures that crossed the perennially green lawns were doctors with name tags, social workers, and nurses in their short haircuts and big blousy shirts covered in flowers or paint strokes. Maynard Psychiatric was one of the oldest psychiatric hospitals in the country. It occupied one of the more desirable plots of real estate in the area, sitting abreast of a wide, lazy river, a river that had figured prominently into the suicidal ideations of generations of mental patients.

  Nearly a month now separated Opal from her suicide attempt. Bruce had kept his word—the review was dropped. In gratitude for this, Charlie focused on being more effective with his other clients, checking in on them with the regularity of a ward nurse, scribbling in his daily log, all within the bounds laid out in his Mobile Treatment manual. Each time he was helpful to one of them, got them to the doctor’s office on time or carried their groceries or talked them home from their demons, he felt he was redeeming himself on the issue of Opal. Gradually, the old fond feelings for Opal had returned, no longer fogged by guilt but by a sense of having learned from his mistakes, and Charlie sometimes caught himself planning her promising future—a fresh start, a job in a flower shop, a bicycle with a basket.

  He climbed the hospital steps three at a time. In his jacket pocket he carried a package of sour balls, a pack of Newport Menthols, and his mother-in-law’s rolled up copy of Redbook. He whistled as he pushed through the hospital doors, winking at the receptionist. He was excited; he was excited to see her. He wanted to tell her she was missed. And forgiven. And maybe he was hoping a little bit that she would be glad to see him too, because wouldn’t that mean he had generally done right by her?

  He saw a familiar colleague walk down the hall with a mug of coffee—an old face from his days in Admitting. Those days seemed a long time ago to him. Back then, he thought, it was all pretty much academic. Academic and medical and prefigured. If he kept going up two more flights, he’d be right back on Gregorian’s loveseat.

  In the two weeks of Marlene’s stay, Charlie and Alice had finally slept, more than they had in the entire past five months. They slept as if they’d just been rescued together from a wreck on the open sea. Marlene, never much of a sleeper herself, did not seem to mind playing the nanny. She was good with the twins. Charlie suspected that the care of infants satisfied her need for exacting performances, and that this was the secret motive of all grandmothers. He was, despite this, hysterically grateful. It was Marlene who was helping him put in some extra evenings at the office, which he needed just then toward his redemption in the eyes of the team. When Charlie had gotten home late several times the previous week, post-dinner, Alice had not objected. Alice looked up at him from her lamplit book and he could see at least she wasn’t lonely, at least she had company, and that she still believed. Loneliness, Charlie thought, the loss of love or the never finding of love, that’s what drives people crazy.

  He entered the ward and knocked on the glass door of the nurse’s station. A pretty young nurse with red hair looked up at him and put down her pencil. She came around to the desk.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Charlie Shade, from the Maynard County MTT. I’m here to see Opal Ludlow. I was her primary, before she came here.”

  “Oh,” said the nurse, smiling with a cute, crinkled nose.

  “I just wanted to drop by. Say hello. She doesn’t have any family up here, so—”

  “Yes,” said the nurse sadly. “We don’t get anybody but you guys. Nice for Opal, though, to get two of you in one day.”

  “Two of us?”

  “Another lady this morning from the MTT. A heavy-set black lady.”

  “Harriet,” said Charlie.

  The nurse pointed at him with her pencil. “That’s her.”

  Charlie stood there, nodding, looking at the nurse’s clean and empty face.

  “She didn’t mention it to me,” he said.

  He took the sour balls out of his pocket.

  “Sour ball?” he said, holding out the package.

  “No thanks,” the nurse replied. She squinted down the hall. “She’s right there in the TV lounge. Enjoy your visit.”

  Charlie had seen a lot of rooms in the past year. He learned to expect that the rooms he entered would be dark and smoky and disorganized, or worse yet, clean, undecorated, and prepared for long absences. But these ward hallways, today, took on a particular chill for him. The successive, identical rooms were all empty, as if suddenly evacuated, except for one figure, breathing shallowly in his bed, facing the window, the sheets twisted around his body exposing his buttocks in worn gray underwear. Charlie turned away and kept walking. Entering the TV lounge, he saw her. Maybe it was the familiar braid fastened with a glittery pink elastic, the sort he would some day use on his daughters’ hair, or maybe it was the rigid set of her frail shoulders facing toward the TV. Or maybe it was the TV itself, gazing down from its cage high in the corner, showing a young couple embracing on a soap opera set, but he felt in himself an overwhelming feeling of desertion, as if he were her, sitting there, squared in a chair, no sentient soul nearby.

  “Opal?”

  A grate covered the window, graphing the world outside into tiny sectors. His attention settled on the wall, where several pieces of children’s art were hung. Crude drawings on pieces of red construction paper. A flower with eyes. A heart with tentacles.

  “Opal?” he said again.

  She did not turn around.

  When he came and stood in front of her, he saw that she was not in fact watching the TV, but staring at the wall in front of her. She lifted her eyes, and moved her gaze delicately until it reached his face.

  She began to cry.

  He knelt in front of her.

  “Jeez,” he said gently.

  He took her hand. It was ice cold.

  “Opal. Why are you crying?”

  Her head was bent almost to her lap. Tears were being squeezed from her eyes. The small curls of hair that had slipped from her braid ringed her face.

  “Opal. You won’t be here much longer, you know. They want to discharge you in a day or so. Soon. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  Squatting, he tried to look up into her face. Her chin was pressed to her chest.

  “You can go back and be in your own place. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  She inhaled sharply, held it, and just like that, the grief in her weeping hardened into something else. She clutched her hands together so ragefully that the fingernails made white crescents against her skin. It appeared as if she was trying to squeeze herself to pieces. Or was she trying to resist striking out, smashing him? Her face was beet red from the strain.

  “Opal? Can you hear me?”

  She shook, she looked through him, her eyes burning. He stood.

  “Nurse!” he called. “Nurse, please!”

  Down the hall, the redhead came
out of the station, wiping her fingers on a paper napkin.

  “We need some help over here. Right away, please.”

  He knelt back down and tried to lift her face with the tip of his finger. Surprisingly, she yielded to his touch, and when her eyes met his again, the rage left them and was replaced once again by grief, as if he himself were changing into different people in her eyes. Despair washed across her features. The expression was so desperate that Charlie leaned back, feeling physically struck. She looked at him as if she were dying of pain—not a physical pain, but a pain of the core of the self. Her look almost begged him: Let it end! Let it end!

  The nurse was upon them. She was checking Opal’s pulse. Opal was docile, and let her eyes and hands be manipulated. Then she offered Opal a pill, and Opal took it between her fingers and the nurse got her a Dixie cup.

  “Go ahead, honey,” said the nurse.

  “Swallow it, Opal,” said Charlie. “Go ahead.”

  Opal’s eyes met his again, and this time the will to be angry or sad went out like a light, and she tipped back her plastic cup of water and swallowed.

  “All right?” he said to Opal, bending down. “We’re right here next to you.”

  The nurse’s hands slid from Opal’s head, leaving her braid mussed. With a shaking hand, Charlie smoothed the hair back down.

  “Jesus,” he said, standing. “They want to discharge her?”

  The nurse made a huffing sound.

  “Well, she was doing all right before,” she said. “She wasn’t even on half-hour checks. Looks like she got upset, seeing you.” She clicked the end of her ballpoint pen and thrust it in her pocket.

  Charlie looked up at the nurse, whose pert red hairstyle and creamy complexion suddenly annoyed him. What the hell did she know?

  “Well, it’s upsetting,” he said. “Sitting in a room all day by yourself. Where is everybody? Aren’t there activities or anything on this ward? It’s goddamned lonely in here.”

  “Everyone else is on a trip to town. But Miss Ludlow didn’t want to do any activities,” said the nurse, folding her arms. “And maybe she doesn’t want visitors, either.”